Should Unemployed Be A Pre Employment Screening Criteria?

Posted by JerryThurber on February 9, 2012

Is there a new type of unemployed worker? Many say yes. In fact, you will find a consensus among most staffing and recruiting professionals that some pretty incredible talent is out there waiting to be picked.  When the economy went into a tailspin, a lot of very good people got caught up in the cycle of unemployment that otherwise never would have been let go.

Over 8% of the population in the United States is unemployed today. I did a quick Google search to see what that meant in terms of real live bodies. I got a range of answers but basically that means somewhere close to 9 to 10 million human beings who want to work are looking for jobs and can’t find them. Lots of these people have been unemployed for six months or more. As the economy starts to get juiced up again, should we snatch up these people to fill our open jobs, or do we look elsewhere for that special someone we need? Should the label of “unemployed” be a criterion for screening out someone during the pre employment screening process?

A natural bias that has grown up over the years leads us to wonder (just a little bit) if the reason people are unemployed is because they weren’t that great at their jobs in the first place. In that last few decades, we’ve all mostly assumed that layoffs often meant the company was letting the bottom performers go. Assumptions like that have always made us leery of hiring those who are out of work. And to make matters worse, if they have been looking for work for over 6 months and couldn’t find anyone to hire them, does that imply something about the kind of employee that might be? I overheard someone talking the other day that he had been unemployed for over a year. His comment was that the one-year mark was an unstated “black threshold” where people basically refused to look at him since he had been out of work for so long.

Does the nature of the economy today challenge those long held assumptions? Is there a new type of unemployed worker? Many say yes. In fact, you will find a consensus among most staffing and recruiting professionals that some pretty incredible talent is out there waiting to be picked.  When the economy went into a tailspin, a lot of very good people got caught up in the cycle of unemployment that otherwise never would have been let go. 

As we begin to staff up in the next few years there will be a lot of currently unemployed people applying for jobs at our companies. As hiring professionals – do we adjust our traditional biases during our employment screening process? What do we do when not only the applicant is unemployed – but so are two out of three of his/her references? What if the company they worked for last doesn’t even exist anymore?

I think the answer is we have to look beyond old biases and instead look for the gems that exist out there. Use your employment screening and background checking process to fully vet the person – but don’t let the stigma of unemployment slow you down!

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